"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson

Thursday, July 21, 2005

The Travails of a Conservative Schoolteacher

I am a conservative. No, I am not saying this like I am standing up at an A.A. meeting; I say it proudly and with enthusiasm. What makes my life interesting is the fact that I am a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers are not exactly known for being paragons of conservatism. My buddy, George Mimmen, over at MimmenBlog is also a conservative schoolteacher and faces the same situations I do. Whenever I interact with my fellow schoolteachers, and I start hearing their usual uninformed drivel about those nasty "right wingers", I just sigh and keep my mouth closed most of the time. Arguing with a Kool Aid drinking leftist is pretty much like slamming your cranium into a brick wall, except I think the wall has more rational thought. I am kind of nervous as I start my new school year, because of my neighbor in the classroom next door. This teacher is an hispanic gentleman who has a vivid red poster of Ernesto "Che" Guevara hanging on the wall of his classroom. Isn't that just flippin' special. Golly, should I put up a poster of Heinrich Himmler in my classroom? Himmler was to Hitler what "Che" was to Castro; they were the men who carried out the dirty work. To find out more about what kind of guy Che Guevara was, read this article by Humberto Fontova. In the article, Fontova talks about Guevara's Stalinist ways, and his cowardly tenure as the man in charge at the infamous La Cabana prison outside Havana. Guevara was nothing more than a thug who killed - sometimes personally - men much braver than himself. For a schoolteacher to prominently and proudly display the grungy mug of a man who was a murdering communist (is that redundant?), is the worst sort of political indoctrination of a young captive audience who doesn't know any better.

2 comments:

Indeed! Just the other day I met with some colleagues, two of which demonstrated queasiness with my suggestion that we focus on the theme of "tyranny vs. democracy" in history class. I teased them that maybe they wanted "victim v. victimizer". I don't think they understood my tease. I love the misfits I work with.

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I am native of the mountains of northern California; 12-year veteran of the U.S. Army and California National Guard; Secondary School History teacher; Husband; Father of Two; and three-time honoree as Time Magazine's Person of the Year (2003, 2006, 2011).